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Modern man's analytical mind, says Hubbard, is a perfect computing machine, incapable of error except when it is supplied with wrong data. An example, typical of Hubbard's cases: a woman is struck by a man, and while she is unconscious he kicks and reviles her. A chair is overturned and a faucet has been left running. She does not "remember" these things because she is unconscious, but according to dianetics her reactive mind records them all in an engram. Later, the crash of an overturned chair and the sound of running water might make the engram "key-in" to her analytical mind, vaguely bring back the pain of the kicks or actually make her ill.
Count to Seven. To exorcise such a demon engram, the dianetics patient lolls on a couch or easy chair in a dimly lit room. The auditor says: "When I count from one to seven your eyes will close." He keeps counting to seven until the patient's eyes close. (The patient, says Hubbard, is still awake but in "reverie.") In a typical procedure, the auditor may next command: "Let us return to your fifth birthday." The patient's mind is then supposed to slip back along its "time track" to that birthday. Having "returned," he "relives" the experience.
By skipping from one point on the time track to another, the patient eventually relives a variety of painful experiences. In so doing, he may reel from the relived pain of a blow on the head, double up with stomach cramps, sweat or shiver in terror. Once these painful engrams have been run through the waking analytical mind, says Hubbard, they lose their "charge"—their power of evil. The analytical mind puts them in a dead file like so many closed accounts. The final goal of dianetics—in its own jargon—is to make the patient a "clear," a person whose every engram has been resolved.
Hubbard's most striking departure from older psychoanalytical schools is his insistence that protoplasm begins to record engrams immediately after conception. He sees the period of gestation as one of dire discomforts and great perils. The most important of all engrams, which he dubs "basic-basic," is the first one received after conception—perhaps during the mother's examination by her doctor, or in some mishap before her pregnancy is known.
Forceps Pains. Frank Dessler, an office manager at 20th Century-Fox, had dabbled in dianetics and was persuaded to audit an actor's wife who had suffered from migraine. Says Dessler: "She was suffering a severe headache, but it wasn't like migraine. It seemed to be sharp and on either side of the head. Finally, she actually experienced birth. She crouched on the couch in foetal position with her head between her knees." She attributed the pain she felt to the pull of the forceps on her head. Having relived her birth, her migraine disappeared.